Khyber Pakhtunkhwa does not suffer from a weak right-to-information law so much as from a government that has learnt to live comfortably around it. That is the real charge contained in the Free and Fair Election Network’s latest findings. Twelve years after KP became Pakistan’s first province to legislate a right-to-information regime after Article 19A, the province is still being asked to do what should by now have become an administrative routine: publish what the law already requires, maintain records in usable form, empower the information commission, and stop treating public information as departmental property.
This comes as a direct indictment of a party using RTI as evidence of its reformist credentials. It told voters that KP would become the laboratory of clean government, that citizens would finally be able to look inside the state, and that secrecy would give way to accountability. FAFEN’s audit shows a different province. It assessed 190 provincial public bodies and found that, on average, they had disclosed only 57 per cent of the information required under the law. Departments are not equally careless about all information. They are least forthcoming where money, discretion and political patronage meet, as only 15 per cent of public bodies disclosed information about decision-making processes or opportunities for public consultation, and just four per cent provided details of recipients of concessions, permits or licences. The constitutional position is clear. Article 19A does not create a courtesy window at the Secretariat as it recognises a fundamental right of access to information in matters of public importance, subject only to lawful regulation and reasonable restrictions.
PTI’s culpability is sharper because KP’s failure cannot be blamed on unfamiliarity. This province has had three PTI-led governments, countless reform claims, digital governance announcements, service-delivery dashboards and anti-corruption speeches. Nor is this the first warning. In 2015, the KP Assembly excluded itself from the purview of the very RTI law it had passed to ensure transparency and good governance.
FAFEN has identified the gaps clearly. The definition of “public body” must cover private entities and NGOs receiving public funds, subsidies, tax concessions or government contracts. The definition of information must include digital and machine-readable records. Citizens must be able to inspect works and documents, obtain certified copies and receive information electronically. Most importantly, the KP Information Commission must be given financial and operational autonomy, inspection powers, authority to issue binding instructions on record management and disclosure timelines, and a secure RTI fund audited by the Auditor General and placed before the Assembly and Public Accounts Committee.
The point is larger than paperwork. In a province marked by security pressures, development gaps, disaster vulnerabilities, weak local government and intense political fault lines, secrecy has consequences. If official information is absent, disinformation grows naturally in the vacuum left by the state. PTI should therefore stop congratulating itself for passing a pioneering law in 2013 and start answering for what it has allowed to happen to that law in practice. *